7/30/2009 @ 9:15AM

Motorola's Secret Weapon

Despite escalating competition,
Motorola
appears confident that its upcoming smart phones–based on
Google
‘s Android operating system–are winners. Two analysts think they know the reason behind the company’s boldness: Motorola, they say, has figured out a way to push updates from social networking Web sites directly to a user’s phone.

The benefit is mostly one of convenience. Such technology would allow people to read messages and updates from social networking sites straight from their mobile e-mail inboxes or home screens. By pushing the updates to users’ devices, Motorola
Motorola
would spare them the time and effort of logging into those sites.

While the idea sounds simple, it has foiled other handset makers thus far. After all, the frequent updates that characterize push technology can also suck up bandwidth and wear down cellphone batteries. The
Google
Android phones currently on the market (from HTC and Samsung) do not support such a feature. Nor does
Apple’s
iPhone, despite its sophistication in many other areas.

Thanks to its Web-oriented operating system, WebOS, Palm’s new Pre comes closest. The phone’s Synergy feature pulls images from people’s Facebook pages to identify them. When a friend calls, that person’s Facebook photo pops up on the screen to indicate an incoming call. If the friend updates his Facebook photo, his photo is automatically updated on the Pre, too.

Barclays Capital analyst Jeff Kvaal believes Motorola’s software, which is known as “Blur,” moves one step beyond Palm’s Synergy by integrating functionality from a network operations center, or NOC. In telecom, NOCs work something like large data centers. In Blur’s case, the software would gather updates from multiple e-mail accounts and social networking sites and then push them onto a user’s device via a NOC, says Kvaal. The NOC allows Blur to operate without hogging bandwidth or draining phone batteries, he adds.

Motorola likely developed the complex system with the help of engineers who previously worked at its Good Technology division, says Kvaal. Motorola acquired Good–a maker of push technology for mobile devices–in 2007 and sold it to mobile e-mail provider Visto in February 2009.

Kvaal calls the idea “conceptually quite clever.” He expects Motorola to offer Blur as an option to carriers and limit it, at least initially, to its high-end Android phones. Motorola said Thursday morning that it will launch two Android handsets in the fourth quarter in the U.S. and, possibly, in some markets in Europe, Latin America and China. Additional Android devices will follow in the first quarter of 2010.

Motorola has not commented publicly about Blur but has said that its Android phones will differentiate themselves through social-networking features. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call Thursday morning, Jha added that Motorola has created “a service for personalized, shareable, end-to-end experiences” for its Android phones related to social messaging and media.

RIM could challenge Motorola’s plan. The manufacturer uses a similar combination of software and a NOC to deliver e-mail to BlackBerrys, and more recently its Facebook and MySpace applications. In May, RIM told developers that they could use push technology in future BlackBerry applications and released a software tool that would let them do so. “It’s fair to say that RIM has the potential to offer similar functionality and may be part-way or largely down that path already,” says Kvaal.

Says Thornton: “Motorola is trying to play a similar card, but with a more consumer and social networking bent.”